Last Tuesday I got a call on my cellphone. To be more accurate, I failed to get a call on my cellphone, as it has been malfunctioning lately, as my editors will attest (with accompanying exasperated sighs). I saw the call notification some time after the attempt: it was from my friend Mick. I texted her back and asked why she had called.

Apparently, she had been at a Trivia Night at some bar and there had been a category on recently-deceased filmmaker John Hughes. No slouch in the area of John Hughes knowledge herself—she has The Breakfast Club T-shirt to prove it—she had called me for help with a question about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Who was the hot blonde in Ferris’ class who tells his teacher that he’s sick?” (...Kristy Swanson, in case you’re wondering.)

It’s kind of funny to me that at least one person considers me some sort of John Hughes authority, but I have to admit, I harbor a deep affection for Hughes’s classic ‘80s teen movies. My high school barkada and I regarded Ferris Bueller, with his high-IQ hijinks and harmless hedonism, as our role model—we tried to live our lives so as to attain the maximum amount of geeky fun while also sidestepping the usual pitfalls of irresponsibility. (It must be said that we did not always succeed.) After high school, I used to catch Pretty in Pink on late-night TV night after night in my insomniac early college years, and wonder about Andie and Blane and Duckie, and their entanglement of love and friendship and teen hormones. I had gone through my own sort of Pretty in Pink love triangle, the difference being that I was not quite as devoted (read: stalker-creepy) as Duckie, and that our real-life Blane turned out to be gay in the end. And also, real-life Andie punched Blane in the face, which she really should have done in the movie, as well.

Anyway: a large part of the charm of Hughes’s teen movies was that they often had perfect soundtracks. Not in the sense that every single track was a killer song, but that they were often deployed in highly effective—and once in a while, utterly heart-somersaulting—ways.

So I made a quick mix of songs from John Hughes teen movies. It’s full of mostly obvious tracks—”Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from The Breakfast Club, for instance—but what can I say, nostalgia and unfamiliarity don’t really go together.

1. The Psychedelic Furs, “Pretty in Pink.” From the movie of the same title. Thank you Molly Ringwald, who first brought the song to the attention of John Hughes, who subsequently built a movie around it as a starrer for Ringwald. I do prefer the earlier, rougher 1981 version though, before they re-recorded and prettied it up for the soundtrack, but in either form, it’s a great little ‘80s rock number, which is now, as rockband.com puts it, “forever associated with sensitive misfit teens in love.”

2. Simple Minds, “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Theme song from The Breakfast Club, which is about how five teens—”a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal”—suffer detention together, and in the process learn some truths about themselves and each other. The song is anthemic, punch-the-sky stuff, and propelled by the hit movie, it went to the top of the charts; for a while, Simple Minds was quite the buzzed-about band. That didn’t last, but the movie itself has endured (it was ranked number 1 on Entertainment Weekly’s list of “the 50 Best High School Movies,” for example).

3. General Public, “Tenderness.” From Weird Science, which, let’s face it, is a supremely silly movie, and probably dialed back my scientific learning several years by convincing me that two nerds could put their heads together and, using little more than an Apple computer and some pictures of supermodels and Albert Einstein, literally create Kelly Le Brock. Still, this is one of those perfect pop songs; jaunty, catchy, and smart (“Words like conviction can turn into a sentence”—I love that). Still makes me want to dance, or sing—preferably both.

4. Thompson Twins, “If You Were Here.” From Sixteen Candles, Hughes’s utterly funny and utterly romantic first salvo in his series of teen flick classics. This song is from the scene where Jake meets Samantha at the church after her sister’s wedding—yeah, you know the one. You sap.

5. New Order, “Shellshock.” Also from Pretty in Pink. Nothing much happens in the film when this plays—if I recall correctly, it’s just a scene where Duckie rides a bicycle (excitement!)—but I do love this synth-driven song. New Order has rarely sounded so urgent, and so over the top.

6. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “If You Leave.” Another track from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack. (That was a great soundtrack.) The first time I heard this, I thought the words went “If you live,” which made me wonder if it was being sung from the point of view of an emergency room doctor (“Now it’s fading fast”), or a particularly schizophrenic boyfriend (from “I won’t waste one single day” to “I’ll be running the other way”).

7. Spandau Ballet, “True.” Also from Sixteen Candles. When I was a child, before I had ever fallen in love with anyone, I could still somehow get absurdly sentimental about this song. Later on—probably some time in between its getting sampled by PM Dawn for “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” and its being used in an Adam Sandler movie—I would come to think it was a bit silly, along with everything else that Spandau Ballet ever did. And now I find that, for various reasons, I can get absurdly sentimental about it again. That’s progress.

8. The Dream Academy, “The Edge of Forever.” From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, my all-time favorite John Hughes movie. Probably the least well-known song in this mix, but wow, it’s a great one. It plays near the end of the flick, when, after having the best day away from school ever, Ferris is saying goodbye to his girlfriend Sloane. It’s one of those epic romantic things, with lines about “a million hearts” and lonely bridges and wild breezes and southern skies.

“The Edge of Forever” makes for a pretty good end to the mix, as it sort of sounds how young love feels, in all its hopeless drama and soaring self-centeredness. John Hughes’s cinematic teenage daydreams may not have been acclaimed as masterpieces, but he did capture a certain moment, and by that I don’t mean just the ‘80s—he captured that moment in many lives when yearning and ignorance and music and first love collide, and one believes that one can never feel as one does at that moment ever again, and one is probably right.

Or to put it more simply and bittersweetly, as Mick said, “These movies are the reason why real life is so disappointing.”

Send questions and comments to Luis at thekingofnothingtodo@yahoo.com.